martedì 31 maggio 2016

Microsoft Account is a free Android application that improves the two-step verification process when signing in to a Microsoft Account.When you sign in to your Microsoft Account on a device, you may be asked to verify the account after entering the correct username and password.
This happens automatically on new devices, but may happen on devices you use regularly as well depending on whether you check that you are using the device regularly during login.
The options provided to verify the identity are to confirm an email address or phone number to have a code send via email or SMS which needs to be entered to verify the identity (options provided depend on the account profile).

Microsoft Account for Android

The process is not very comfortable, as you will have to use a separate program usually to retrieve the code to enter it on the sign in page.
Additionally, you will always have to enter (part of or all of) the email address or phone number before the code is even send using the selected method.
Microsoft Account for Android devices improves the process. The application has been designed to improve the two-step verification process by requiring just a tap when the app is running to verify the sign in request (or deny it).
You do need to authorize the app first before you can make use of it though. This happens like any other sign in to a Microsoft Account: enter your username and password, select one of the available two-step verification options, enter the code when you receive it, and you are set.
The sign in page highlights that codes are send to the Microsoft Account application. Simply open the application on your device and hit the approve button to verify the identity.
It is still possible to get codes in a different way by clicking on the "having trouble" link on the sign in page.
Simply select "get a code a different way" to use text, email or application instead for account verification.
A side-effect of using the application is that you may see when someone else signs in using your username and password, as the Microsoft Account application will display a verification prompt in this case (which you should deny).
This is different from email or phone verification, as they need to be initiated by the user signing in.
Microsoft Account for Android does not support notifications on the other hand, and there is no history of previous identification attempts.
You may add multiple accounts to the application, and it generates security codes which you can use in the second verification step to sign in to the account.Closing Words
Microsoft Account for Android is a handy application, especially for users who sign in to their account on different devices regularly.

sabato 28 maggio 2016

Google Photos just had its first birthday, and in celebration the search giant is looking back over the year to see how Photos did on its first journey around the sun. They report that 200 million people use Photos every month, and their automated assistant has generated over 1.6 billion animations, collages, and movies for the entertainment of users. The biggest figure here? Google is now holding 13.7 petabytes of picture that would have had to occupy space on devices.
13.7 petabytes is a massive amount of information. In fact, it’s more data than could fit on a 10 petabyte hard drive. Even a 13 petabyte hard drive would be overwhelmed by this amount of data. It’s so much data that if petabytes were eggs, and you went to the grocery store to buy a carton of petabytes, you would have to buy a carton larger than the standard dozen-egg carton. If you’re still having a hard time wrapping your head around this figure in spite of my helpful comparisons, then just imagine 182.2 years of HD-TV video playing 800,000 full-length movies back to back.See also: Google Photos on the web lets you easily adjust the dates and times of multiple photos4

While Google has our attention with this birthday announcement, they’re also pointing out a few of their favorite tips and tricks that you can use on the app. They point out that not only can you search by names, but you can also narrow down pics and look at just those that contain two specific people. Resist the temptation to search for yourself and your ex, because that route will only end in a hangover, and you have plans for tomorrow morning. You can also search by emoji, change which folders sync up from your mobile devices, and create a shared album so that a group of friends or family can all upload photos to a common location.
What do you think of Google Photos? Do you use it on the regular, or does it creep you out to know your photos are being consumed and digested by a soulless information leviathan? I for one embrace the beast and can’t imagine life without it, but let us know your take in the comments below.

venerdì 13 maggio 2016

Your WhatsApp account is filled with motivational quotes, memes and other junk images that are clogging your phone’s memory. Here’s how to smartly delete all the useless content in one go.

WhatsApp is probably the largest space hog on our mobile phones. We all have friends and relative who diligently forward us every single motivation quote and meme they’ve received from their own network. Some think it is their duty to wake us with a “good morning” message accompanied with photos of the rising sun or chirping birds.

The bigger problem with WhatsApp is that these ‘spam’ messages often originate from contacts who are close to you in real life and thus blocking them would be considered rude. You have an option to mute WhatsApps groups but the downloaded images would still take up precious space on your mobile phone.
A simple solution to the problem would be that you open the Photo Gallery app on your Android phone, or use a File Manager app to locate the media folder of WhatsApp, and delete the entire folder containing those WhatsApps images. But since WhatsApp makes no distinction between real photographs and useless forwards, you risk deleting the good pictures too.

Are junk WhatsApp images filling up your phone’s memory?

Siftr, an Indian startup founded by ex-Adobe employees, has launched an intelligent Android App that can help you get rid of all the junk photos from your WhatsApp with no effort.
The app, Magic Cleaner, scans the media folder of your WhatsApp app and automatically detects all the junk images including screenshots, memes, video screen grabs, cartoons and other pictures with overlay text. You are then offered an option to delete all the detected images in one go.
Previous: Create Photography Websites with Siftr
How does it work? Like Cloud Vision, Google’s image recognition API, Siftr has developed their own image recognition engine that analysis the content of an image to determine whether it’s junk or not. It requires an active Internet connection because the image analysis is done on Siftr servers and not locally on the mobile phone. However it is unlikely to blow up your data plan as the app only uploads a small hash of the image and matches it against their own database of images.
I ran the photo cleaner app against a WhatsApp account that had about 4000+ images and it could successfully clean it up in about 10 minutes. The accuracy was very impressive. The app is free but you can only auto-delete a limited number of images in a single run. If you would like to delete more images, you either need to invite a friend to use the app or wait for a day.

If you have WhatsApp, which you probably do, Magic Cleaner is a must-have app. An iPhone version is in the works. Also, though the WhatsApps images are deleted from the memory card, a blurred thumbnail will still exist inside your WhatsApp message logs and you’ll have to erase them manually.
Also see: Sync WhatsApp Photos with Google Drive or Dropbox